New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

What is “Chardino-Marxism” and why is Foucault talking about it? (part 1)

By Gordon hull

In a 1966 interview with Madeline Chapsal, Foucault proposes that “our task currently is to definitively liberate ourselves from humanism” and offers the following example:

“Our task is to free ourselves definitively from humanism, and it is in this sense that our work is political work, insofar as all the regimes of the East or West pass out their bad goods under the flag of humanism. We have to denounce all these mystifications, like today, inside the Communist Party, where Althusser and his courageous companions are struggling against “Chardino-Marxism.”” (33)

Other than the fusion of Teilhard de Chardin and Marx, what is “Chardino-Marxism” and why does Foucault care?

Teilhard was a Jesuit priest and scientist who tried to reconcile his work in paleontology with Christianity.  I’m dependent on Wikipedia for this, so I’ll just let you read the desription there of his main work, the Phenomenon of Man:

“His posthumously published book, The Phenomenon of Man, set forth a sweeping account of the unfolding of the cosmos and the evolution of matter to humanity, to ultimately a reunion with Christ. In the book, Teilhard abandoned literal interpretations of creation in the Book of Genesis in favor of allegorical and theological interpretations. The unfolding of the material cosmos is described from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, and finally to his vision of the Omega Point in the future, which is "pulling" all creation towards it. He was a leading proponent of orthogenesis, the idea that evolution occurs in a directional, goal-driven way. Teilhard argued in Darwinian terms with respect to biology, and supported the synthetic model of evolution, but argued in Lamarckian terms for the development of culture, primarily through the vehicle of education.”

Teilhard is also known for developing the concept of “noosphere” to refer to the space of human reason and a transcendence of biology; this concept had some uptake among early Internet theorists.  Apparently Teilhard was very trendy in the 1950s and 1960s.  Foucault mentions him occasionally, and always to associate him with humanism.  Later in the interview quoted above, and in response to question about whether the direction he was taking philosophy didn’t appear “cold and rather abstract,” Foucault exclaims: “it is humanism that is abstract!” and adds:

“What makes me angry about humanism is that it is now this screen behind which the most reactionary thought takes refuge, where monstrous and unthinkable alliances are formed: they want to combine Sartre and Teilhard, for example. In the name of what? Of man! Who would dare speak ill of man? And yet, the effort currently being made by people of our generation is not done in order to claim man [a]s against knowledge and against technology, but is precisely to show that our thought, our life, our manner of being, even our most everyday manner of being, are part of the same systematic organisation and therefore depend on the same categories as the scientific and technical world.” (34-5, translation slightly revised. Emphases original).

In a 1968 interview with Yngve Lindung that appeared in Stockholm (D&E #54; I can’t find a translation), Foucault elaborates a more on the topic. Asked if structuralism was opposed to Marxism, he acknowledges that “it is true that there are certain Marxists who are declared anti-structuralists,” but adds that “at the same time, we need to say that there are a large number of Marxists, among the youngest and let’s say the most dynamic, who on the contrary feel very close to structuralist research.”  He explains:

“In general, one can say that we have to deal today with a soft, bland, humanist Marxism which tries to pick up everything that traditional philosophy has been able to say from Hegel up to Teilhard de Chardin [qui essaie de ramasser tout ce que la philosophie traditionnelle a pu dire depuis Hegel jusqu’à Teilhard de Chardin].  This Marxism is anti-structuralist insofar as it is opposed to structuralism’s having put in question the old values of bourgeois liberalism.  Then we have an opposing group of Marxists that we could call anti-revisionists and for whom the future of Marxist thought and of the communist movement indeed requires that one reject all this eclecticism, all this interior revisionism, all this peaceful coexistence concerning the plan of ideas, and these Marxists are instead structuralists” (D&E I, 682-3 (2 vol version)). 

Later in the interview he names the PCF intellectual Roger Garaudy in this regard.  Now, Garaudy claims to be inspired by structuralism.  But he also claims to be a humanist.  Foucault responds that “I don’t believe that one could reasonably pretend that Garaudy is a Marxist.”  He then adds that “it doesn’t in any way surprise me that Garaudy wants to gather [recueillir] what he is able to call a concrete structuralism and humanism.  He has picked up everything from Hegel to Teilhard de Chardin.  He will pick me up too [Il a tout ramassé depuis Hegel jusqu’à Teilhard de Chardin. Il me ramassera aussi]” (684).

The objection is to the eclecticism, and one can imagine Garaudy as having produced what one might call a scavenger Marxism.  There is definitely this sense to Garaudy.  I’ll say more in a later post, but in Marxism in the Twentieth Century (1966), for example, he writes that “structuralism can, like cybernetics [!], be one of the ways of comprehending the world and of conceiving man and his action, which corresponds the best to the spirit of our time, to the development of a new humanism: this will be precisely the humanism of which Marx was the pioneer, integrating all that was one by Graeco-Roman humanism and Judeo-Christian humanism, and going beyond both in a new synthesis of nature and man, of the external world and subjectivity, of necessary law and liberty” (75).

That’s a lot!  Foucault wants nothing of it.  Later in the Lindung interview he says the following, which is worth quoting at length:

“The situation of the French left is still dominated by the presence of the communist party.  The current problematic at its interior is essentially the following: should the party, theoretically and politically, make itself the agent of peaceful coexistence, which politically drives [entraîne] a sort of neutralization of the conflict with the U.S., and which comports, from an ideological point of view, with an attempt at ecumenicism thanks to which all the important ideological currents in Europe and in the world are found [retrouveraient] more or less reconciled?  It is clear that people like Sartre and Garaudy work toward this peaceful coexistence between diverse intellectual currents, and they precisely say: but we don’t have to abandon humanism, but we don’t have to abandon Teilhard de Chardin, but existentialism is also a little bit right , but structuralism too, if only it wasn’t doctrinaire, but concrete and open to the world.  Opposed to this current, which puts coexistence at the first rank, you have a current that the ‘right wing people’ call doctrinaire, neostalinist and Chinese.  This tendency inside the PCF is an attempt to reestablish a Marxist theory of politics, of science and of philosophy which is a consequential theory, ideologically acceptable, in accord with the doctrine of Marx.  It is this attempt which at this moment effected [opérée] by the intellectuals of the left wing of the party, and they are more or less regrouped around Althusser.  This structuralist wing is the left.  You understand now what this maneuver of Sartre and Garaudy consists in, knowing how to pretend that structuralism is a typical ideology of the right.  It lets them designate as accomplices of the right those who are in reality to their left.  It lets them consequently present themselves as the only true representatives of the French left and communists.  But this is only a maneuver” (686)

In this sense, Teilhard seems to be less of interest to Foucault than what Garaudy in particular is doing with Teilhard within the PCF.  Teilhard is a stalking horse for Marxist humanism, which (like other humanisms) is to be combatted. 

Next time, I’ll pick up from here…

Signal or Noise? Foucault and Communication Theory (part 2): Noise as Resistance

By Gordon Hull

Last time, I followed up on a reference in Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code to Foucault’s short text “Message ou bruit” (1966). Here I want to trace out some of the political implications of that text, or at least to suggest a path from it to some of his later work in the 1970s and current forms of political resistance.

One of Foucault’s emergent interests in philosophy of language is in pragmatics and speech act theory. I don’t know enough about his reading in the relevant time period to know if this exactly tracks his growing interest in politics, but by a 1978 lecture in Japan (which I discussed here) he is able to say that:

“Perhaps one could see that there is still a certain possibility for philosophy to play a role in relation to power, which would be a role neither of foundation nor of renewal of power. Perhaps philosophy can still play a role on the side of counter-power, on the condition that this role does not consist in exercising, in the face of power, the very law of philosophy, on the condition that philosophy stops thinking of itself as prophesy, on the condition that philosophy stops thinking of itself either as pedagogy, or as legislation, and that it gives itself the task to analyse, clarify, and make visible, and thus intensify the struggles that develop around power, the strategies of the antagonists within relations of power, the tactics employed, the foyers of resistance, on the condition in sum that philosophy stops posing the question of power in terms of good and bad, but rather poses it in terms of existence. The question is not: is power good or bad, legitimate or illegitimate, a question of right or morality? Rather, one should simply try to relieve the question of power of all the moral and juridical overloads that one has placed on it, and ask the following naïve question, which has not been posed so often, even if a certain number of people have actually posed it for a long while: what do power relations fundamentally consist in?” (192)

Foucault’s emphases here – from the emphasis on local struggles to the rejection of prophetic thinking – should be familiar. He then immediately suggests that “We have known for a long time that the role of philosophy is not to discover what is concealed, but rather to make visible what precisely is visible, which is to say to make appear what is so close, so immediate, so intimately connected with ourselves that we cannot perceive it.” This is recognizable as a reference to Wittgenstein – specifically, the remark in Philosophical Investigations 128 that “the work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.”

Signal or Noise? Foucault and Communication Theory (Part 1)

By Gordon Hull

Last time, I offered a quick synopsis of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s excellent new book Code.  Here, I’d like to track one specific Foucault reference in it.  Geoghegan takes Lévi-Strauss’s Savage Mind as a central text in the ambivalence French theorists came to feel about American communication theories, and he notes that the book “occasioned a broader reassessment of the human sciences marked by a new ascent of ‘coding’ as a key concept poised to dislocate and perhaps dissolve, existing scientific hierarchies” (152).  He adds:

“Learning to code – that is, to cast cultural objects in terms of codes, relays, patterns, and systems – did more than reframe existing knowledge in cybernetic jargon. It also reflected a growing cynicism toward existing cultural and scientific nodes. From the 1960s onward, the semiotic task of deciphering obscure ‘codes’ in culture, politics, and science overtook the structuralist project. This crypto-structuralism shifted emphasis from the neutral connotations of ‘communication’ to antagonistic notions of code …. If these terms furthered the technocratic project of US foundations, they also set in motion a radical critique of scientific neutrality. Beneath the neutral science, something ‘savage’ lurked.” (152-3).

Geoghegan cites Lacan, Barthes and the Tel Quel group (on which see Danielle Marx-Scouras’s excellent study).  He also quietly footnotes Foucault’s “Message ou bruit [message or noise]” “for a critical discussion of these same terms by Foucault” (215n81).

Reading List: Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Code

By Gordon Hull

I made myself wait until I was settled into the summer to read Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code: From Information Theory to French Theory.  It was absolutely worth the wait. Code offers a look into the role of cybernetic theory in the development of postwar French theory, especially structuralism and what Geoghegan calls “crypto-structuralism.”  The story starts in the progressive era U.S., with the emergence of technocratic forms of government and expertise “against perceived threats of anarchy and communism” and the “progressive hopes to submit divisive political issues for neutral technical analysis” (25).  This governance as depoliticization then generates the postwar emphasis on cybernetics and information theory.  Along the way, it picks up and reorganizes psychology and anthropology in figures like Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, as the emerging information theory disciplines are given extensive funding by “Robber Baron philanthropies” (and later, covertly of course, by the CIA).  This then sets the stage for postwar cybernetic theory and the careful cultivation (again, substantially by philanthropies and the CIA) of intellectuals like Roman Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss.

This is not a story I’d heard before – and I get the impression that almost no one has, at least not in philosophy, which is why this book is so important – and the details are fascinating.  It makes a compelling case for the need for those of us who work on the post-war French to get a handle on cybernetic theory in particular, especially because of the link to structuralism (more on that in a moment).  It calls to mind some of Katherine Hayles’ work – I’m thinking of How we Became Posthuman and My Mother Was a Computer – that probably needs rereading in this context.